04. The Aesthetic Essence of Spain: The Españolada, Folklore, and Flamenco1 Idoia Murga Castro
result of this lukewarm attempt at Spanish-Italian convergence, an Exhibition of Italian Art was held in the Museo de Arte Moderno in Madrid. The opinions it gave rise to illustrate the understanding of Italian art at the time.
Immutable and accepted, the stereotypes associated with the imaginary of “Spanishness” were a powerful element within the artistic narratives of the 1940s. These stereotypes—which were a legacy of romanticism, defined on the other side of the Pyrenees—went from being accepted as a cultural construct imposed from the outside to being projected as selfrepresentation within Spain, and were even linked to the recovery and elevation of popular culture as part of the construction of modernity and the avant-garde. In this composite imaginary, the accepted nineteenth-century mix of “Carmens,” toreadors, and bandits by which “Spanishness” had come to be equated with qualities such as passion, violence, sensuality, heroism, and pride found its fullest expression in the type of films that became known as “españoladas.” The incorporation of live action and theatrical aspects boosted the dissemination of these cultural constructs even further, introducing the truth and emotional value of the body through live performance and embracing shared memory by means of folklore. At the same time, the presence of fiction was a constant reminder that the films were mise-en-scènes, predefined products loaded with meaning about what Spain “was.”
Press criticism of the exhibition was particularly vehement toward modern artists such as Aligi Sassu and Renato Gattuso. Some, such as critic José Camón Aznar, sought a happy medium in the “spirit of all forms of classicism incorporated into the structural feeling of modern forms.” The critic reworded hackneyed ideas such as spirit, classicism, and modernity to find a place from which the exhibition could be seen as a starting point for a necessary renewal in Spain, including artistic renewal, interpreting the idea of Italy as a harmonious movement between the modern and the classical. His text was written for an average reader and published by ABC. “Art in Italy today has had the good fortune to have incorporated the spirit of all forms of classicism with the structural feel of modern forms.” Artists were generally equated in worth to their classical counterparts, but criticism was not lacking either. Camón Aznar, for instance, regretted the lack of “loggias, terraces, perspectives or painted marble heads” in de Chirico’s Roman paintings and that, “in spite of certain delayed futuristic deviations such as we find in the clumsy paintings of Sassu and the frivolous work of Gattuso, there seems to be a deeply noble obsession in this exhibition to present the structure of things, to desiccate color and movement and only allow the most essential values onto the canvas.” The exhibition may have been intended by its organizers as a gateway to the future, but Camón Aznar’s texts and others seem still to be attempting to settle a debt with the Italian art of the past.
Postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha defines stereotypes as “a form of knowledge and identification that vacillates between what is always ‘in place,’ already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated,” an ambivalence that is obsessively present in Spanish arts from the 1940s.2 Since the Civil War, for example, stereotypes had been a weapon used to maintain internal cohesion against the “other,” an enemy “other” that the imaginary warded against by backing a cause and proving its legitimacy. With this inertia, “Spanishness” had a double effect in the 1940s: in Spain, it was an element of Francoist appropriation, and beyond Spain it was a means of cultural resistance and survival in the places where Republican exiles had settled.
1. “I popoli ricchi non esportano soltanto merci ma figure e miti, cioè immagini rappresentative dell’anima e della natura della nazione.”
One of the legitimation strategies that Francisco Franco’s dictatorship used in the midst of World War II was to organize La Quinzaine de l’art espagnol in occupied Paris in 1942, with the support of Galerie Charpentier, the Foreign Service section of the Falange Española, and the collaborationist government.3 The festival included an exhibition of works by Spanish artists— both pro-regime and exiles living in Paris—accompanied by a program of five Spanish dance and flamenco performances and a lecture series that included a paper by Gregorio Marañón entitled “El alma de España y el arte español” (The soul of Spain and Spanish art). The convergence of dance, music, visual arts, and science emphasizing a certain image of Spain proved that in the midst of war fascism needed to counteract the grand cultural events that had given Republican Spain the upper hand, and to strengthen international supports that were still of interest to the dictator.
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